The focus of web authoring today is more on creating content for the online experience instead of moving content initially created for printed pages to the web. When creating a new website, a web author first decides what content should be presented. The author needs further decide how to present the information. A markup language is applied to realize the presentation, which gives a physical structure to the web page content. Considering the whole process, the Extensible Markup Language (XML) can be used to represent the semantic structure of a web page and many markup languages, such as Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), can be used to represent the physical structure of the web page. The present state of the art, however, still lacks an effective way to represent the presentation structure of a web page that can be used by web page authors to easily design the way in which content can be presented on a web page.
Although many authoring tools, such as the FrontPage® software provided by Microsoft Corporation of Redmond, Wash., USA, have been developed to help authors with presentation design, a problem with these tools is their lack of an effective way to express and realize presentation design.
The increasing diversity in terms of devices, protocols, networks and user preferences in today's World Wide Web has made adaptive capability somewhat desirable for Internet applications. The term “adaptive capability” means having the ability to take web page content presented in one form (such as that which would be presented in the form of a website on a desktop computer) and process it to present or display it in another form (such as that which would be presented on a handheld device). Present tools achieve such adaptation only under some special conditions due to the lack of structural information. To achieve adequate adaptation, however, the web page author's intentions with respect to the presentation design should be understood and reflected in the adaptation.
The present state of the art of web authoring tools has various problems. While there is a general lack of an effective way to express web page presentation design, these tools are more focused upon physical realization. Neither are the streaming authoring interfaces suitable for the requirement of web presentation design. Web page authors may try different presentation schemes for the same content or adapt content to various devices. The present state of the art, however, lacks an effective tool to convert or adapt a current presentation design to a new one. Moreover, there is a lack of a tool to physically realize the presentation design. Although some web authoring tools do provide conversion from a layout design to a physical realization, the final results are not satisfactory. Additionally, dump and verbose codes are often generated from these prior art web authoring tools.
Some prior art approaches to representing presentation design mostly focus on printed document presentation, which is quite different from contemporary web page content presentation. Other prior art approaches, specifically for web page content, focus more on the semantic layout structure of the web page without considering the logic relationship of its web page content. As such, there is a need in the art for an effective way to fully represent the intentions of an author of a web page with respect to the presentation design of the web page.
Accordingly, this invention arose out of concerns associated with providing improved methods and systems for website design, re-authoring, and adaptation.